I launched ManagingCommunities.com 8 years ago. At that point, I had been managing online communities for about 8 years (and moderating them for 10). After 5 years in development and approximately 100 publishers who didn’t want to publish a book about community, Managing Online Forums was about to be released. I decided I wanted to start writing about community regularly.

Even after all this time, I still keep a close eye on mentions of my work, and it still means a lot to me when something I wrote helps someone. Thank you to everyone who has been supportive of my work. If you’ve shared it, provided a thoughtful comment or a kind word in private, that means you.

Looking forward, I am planning to make some changes to this website. It needs a new design, and probably the biggest part of that will be completely overhauling how information is organized. It’s badly needed. It’ll take some time to make these changes, but I am really excited about them.

You may love your onboarding process. It might be a beautiful, well-thought out series of steps meant to make people feel more comfortable and begin their journey as a contributor.

But if I can’t skip it, it’s a mistake.

Last weekend, I found myself on a somewhat well-known social media platform (and online community, of sorts), going through their onboarding. It started off simply enough: with a list of suggested topics I could follow.

Here’s the thing: I virtually never do suggested topics or follow suggested users. I skip. I don’t want to pick suggested topics because suggested topics lead to notifications via the site and email. It clogs my feed and my inbox. I don’t want any of it.

In our line of work, we are sometimes told that community is a 24/7 gig. That because the internet is always on, so must we be. I know this sounds rude, but ignore anyone who says this. That belief leads to burnout, and it drives people out of our industry (or worse).

I take pride in my work ethic, but I try not to confuse that with a lack of balance. As Sherrie said on the show, “taking the time to take care of yourself, so that you can be who you need to be for your community, makes you so much more effective and so much more what they need.”

In 2015, I interviewed for four different jobs. I had loose discussions about a few other opportunities and turned down interest from a really big company.

None of these jobs were a fit. But I couldn’t have known that without going through the process. The fact is, after I went through the interview process for these four jobs, there was only one that I actually wanted.

It can be a real struggle to find a role that ticks off the important boxes, especially for a senior or executive-level community professional, who wants to stay in the industry. I haven’t really seen any experienced professionals in our space talk about the interviews they have gone through, for the jobs they didn’t accept – or didn’t get offered. I’m happy to share my experiences over the last 12 months.

The seventh annual Community Manager Appreciation Day is on January 25, 2016 and, for the fourth straight year, My Community Manager is planning a livestream featuring 24 hours of community management-related programming.

I am organizing a session on volunteer management, scheduled for 4 PM EST (GMT -5). Unfortunately, it’s unclear whether or not I will be able to participate, but I am working on it. However, I built the session so that I wouldn’t really be needed. My panelists, Rebecca Newton, Scott Moore and David DeWald (who is also tentative, but hopeful that he’ll make it) are extraordinarily well-versed on this topic. Whether or not I’m there, it should be a great discussion.

Unfortunately, they did not see fit to have a guest who had experience writing and enforcing these types of policies. While all members of the panel can speak with conviction on the realities of using Twitter as a public figure, none have meaningful experience managing social platforms and dealing with these challenges and the resulting fallout.

I thought it would be fun to use this segment as a means of talking about these issues. Let’s pretend they invited me on as a guest for this discussion. Here’s what I would have said.